Guiana was the first part of the New World to be explored by adventurers other than the Spaniard and the Portuguese, and to this day it stands out as foreign to the rest of Spanish America. The English, the French, the Dutch fought between themselves for its territory and its colonizing and trading stations. The English sought an El Dorado, the Dutchman thought of its tobacco--which the Spaniards would not permit him to obtain from their colonies--the Frenchman took part possibly out of national pride, thinking he ought not to be left out in the partition, but his work seems to have been of a disastrous nature ever since he set foot there. The Pilgrim Fathers, before they "moored their bark on a wild New England coast," had dreams of settling here, where the warm climate and tropic possibilities seemed to hold out greater allurements than the cold coasts of the more northern continent. When Surinam, or Dutch Guiana, was exchanged for the New Netherlands and New Amsterdam--to-day New York--few Dutchmen dissented, and some English protested. "Like the valley of the Amazon, to which system it may be considered an offshoot, it is a land of forest and stream. The coast is generally an alluvial flat, often below high-water mark, fringed with courida (_Avicennia nitida_) on the seashore, and mangrove (_Rhizophora manglier_) on the banks of the tidal rivers. Where it is not empoldered it is subject to the wash of the sea in front and the rising of the swamp water behind. In fact, it is a flooded country, as the name, from _wina_ or _Guina_ (water) seems to imply. "The lowest land is the delta of the Orinoco, where the rising of the river often covers the whole. Coming to the north-west of British Guiana, we have a number of channels (_itabos_) forming natural waterways through swamps, navigable for canoes and small vessels. A similar series of natural canals is found in Dutch Guiana. From the Orinoco to Cayenne this alluvium is rarely above high-water mark, and is subject to great changes from currents, the only protection being the natural palisade of courida, with its fascine-like roots. On the coast of Cayenne, however, the land rises, and there are rocky islands; here the swamps come at some distance behind the shore, and between ridges and banks of sand.